A 15-year-old girl helped her mother -- who was wearing an Islamic headscarf -- manage a search engine while a boy sitting nearby -- his hair spiked like a punk rocker -- checked out a music site.
Most of these children's grandparents made their living in the sugar cane fields that cover this small Indian Ocean island, home to 1.2 million people. Many of their parents toil in textile factories or tourist resorts.
But if the government has its way, these children will lead Mauritius into the 21st century, transforming the country's economy once again. The government is seeking to benefit from an undersea, fiber-optic cable that runs by this tropical island on its way from Europe to southern India's high-tech corridor. By simply hooking into it, Mauritius increased its bandwidth 40,000 percent.
A new and cheap national resource was born.
"We want to become a cyber-island," said Germain Comarond, managing director of the government's Board of Investment.
Mauritius is already well ahead of almost all African countries in per capita computer ownership. With sugar subsidies ending, textile quotas shifting and tourism reaching its limits, information technology is seen as the nation's best bet for future growth.
"Our youth are not willing to work in the textile factories," Comarond said. "Because they are more educated now, they want to work in the services sector."
Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth says the government plans to provide Internet connections to every home, just as it does water, electricity and telephone service. He aims to have a computer in every home by 2009, a target local experts say is within reach since some businesses have begun giving employees computers to take home.
The cyber-bus is operated by the National Computer Board, an agency formed in 1988 to spur technology here, as part of a three-year campaign to create a "computer culture" on the island. More than 15,000 people have visited the bus to learn basic computing and surf the Internet in the last two years, officials say.
Meanwhile, just south of the capital of Port Louis, cranes rise from a sugar cane field where construction began in September on Mauritius' first "cyber-city," an industrial park for information-technology companies.
Though Mauritians have the highest average annual income in Africa -- $3,500 -- that's cheap by Western standards.
Indian companies that provide call centers and back-office operations for U.S. and British companies plan to enter the growing French-language market by hiring Mauritians, taking advantage of the country's relatively low wages and widespread fluency in English and French.
State Informatics LTD, a Mauritian software company, already provides programmers to major telecommunications companies in six African countries, said Kushan Naik, general manager.
Yet, like so much of the developing world, Mauritius is short on skilled workers. Despite a doubling of the size of the computer engineering department at the University of Mauritius, the country produces only 500 to 600 qualified information technology specialists a year, said instructor Arvindnath Rosunee.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is helping via a virtual learning center set up with the university that gives Mauritian students access to course materials used at MIT. Local instructors provide the hands-on experience.
The World Bank has approved a $40 million loan to the government in May to help improve schools and add more computers to classrooms.
Although Mauritius is one of the mostly densely populated countries -- the main island is three-fourths the size of Rhode Island -- the government has instituted a policy that gives foreign high-tech professionals work permits and grants citizenship to anyone willing to invest more than $500,000.
Critics question the government's technology expenditures and wonder how a small island with little high-tech experience can hope to attract foreign investment when the industry is in recession.
But speaking at the National Computer Board's annual InfoTech convention earlier this month, Jugnauth said he had heard the same doubts expressed when he proposed more than 20 years ago to open the textile mills that later drove the island's economic growth. Jugnauth, who heads a coalition government, returned to power in 2000 elections after a five-year break.
The thousands of young people who flooded into the InfoTech exhibition on its opening day were clearly excited by the possibilities of the cyber-island initiative.
"Computer engineering is a field where we can put our creativity and logic to use," said Karuna Boyonauth, a 20-year-old student. "I like this kind of job. It is a global job."
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